Reading and Writing History and Fiction (and sometimes food)

Tag Archives: love

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice —
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do —
determined to save
the only life you could save.

I found this poem while I was in graduate school in Toronto in the 90s, in one of the New Yorkers lying around the PIMS Common Room from their subscription. I have returned to it over and over again since that time (sigh), and I am putting it on my blog so I can find it more easily, darn it.

“My Soul is a Light Housekeeper”
(Error in the printing of the line “My soul is a lighthouse keeper,”
by an unknown female poet.)

Bored with the high drama of watching,
I see myself bound always to your absence,
sending out my pure circle of light so you
will know where I am, and how close
you might come to disaster. Imagine, love,
the tedium of this watch. On almost every day
nothing happens. And isn’t it wrong to yearn
for a great storm just to feel important?
I’ll let you go, then. Why shouldn’t my house
be my own, and my soul its keeper?
This work I needn’t take so seriously
since I’ve learned what pleases me, the light
of late afternoon through that window,
the intricate cobwebs I won’t disturb.
I know you don’t want to think of me
not always thinking of you, brave and imperilled.
I’m sure you’ll write to say: How can you change
so completely? You’re not the woman
I thought I knew. And I’m not,
but understand, dear, it wasn’t such a great change.
Imagine you could have seen that side of me
at the beginning, when we walked
for hours along the shore, and you were so certain
I was yours just because you loved me.